


Unasked

by story_monger



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Aromantic, Aromantic Scully, Asexual Mulder, Asexuality, Bisexual Scully, Gen, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3813403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mysterious lights, messy cars, smoking with waitresses, and navigating relationships in a road trip to Ohio.</p><p>A college AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unasked

**Author's Note:**

> I made [a playlist](http://8tracks.com/story_monger/ace-alien-roadtrips) while writing this.

“You want to go somewhere?”

Scully glanced up just enough to catch Mulder’s expression before dropping her eyes back to her textbook.

“I’m already going off the deep end,” she said in a flat voice. “You can hop on if you want.”

Mulder released a sharp laugh before crashing into the seat next to her and making the table wobble. Scully didn’t have enough focus left to scold him. She settled for pursing her lips.

“We’d go somewhere after your midterm’s done,” Mulder clarified, leaning over to squint at her textbook.

“After this midterm’s done I’m going to get that box of wine under my bed and find something truly crappy to watch and then die among my vices.”

“Jesus, okay.” Mulder leaned forward with his elbows braced on the shaky particleboard tabletop. “Well, what if you come with me instead of watching crappy TV, bring the wine, and then in the end you can die among half your vices.”

Scully blinked at the page of formulas, then dragged her eyes up to meet Mulder’s.

“Where did you say you were going?” she asked.

“I didn’t.” Mulder’s eyebrows waggled. “It’s a surprise.”

Scully brought a hand up to dig her thumb and forefinger into her sockets. “I don’t think—“

“What do you have tomorrow?” Mulder insisted. “English? You could breeze through that class without attending a single lecture, Scully. And then after that’s the weekend so—“

“Wait, now this is a multi-day event?” Scully interrupted. “Mulder, how far away is this?”

“Not very,” Mulder said evasively.

“’Not very’ as in within the state? Or ‘not very’ as in we can conceivably make it there and back by Monday if we don’t bother sleeping?” Mulder made an exaggerated face, squinting one eye and peering at the ceiling. “ _Mulder._ ”

“In between,” Mulder conceded. “Maybe a six hour drive.”

Scully rubbed at her forehead. “Why do you have to spring this stuff on me right before…listen, let me worry about this test, okay? We’ll talk after that.”

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a definite maybe.”

“Good enough.” Mulder rested his head in one hand. With his other hand, he flipped at the cover of Scully’s battered lab manual. “You haven’t asked about what we’re going to see.”

“As if you’d give me anything useful,” Scully replied. “C’mon, stop trying to be enigmatic and quiz me on these equations.”

***

They passed the next two hours tucked in the far corner of the library’s main study room, Mulder being sporadically helpful, and Scully hunched over the table as she did practice problems. A half hour before the test, Scully’s brain ached in a reassuring way.

“I’m heading over,” she announced, slapping her textbook closed and making her chair skitter across the floor when she stood. Mulder looked up from his battered paperback.

“You ready?” he asked.

“As I can be.” Scully shoved supplies into her satchel. “Besides, it’s more about beating the curve than beating the actual test.”

“Ruthless; I like it.” Mulder stood and lifted his hands over his head for a long stretch.

“What’s with your midterms?” Scully asked, clasping her satchel shut. “Are you already done?”

“I just had a bunch of papers.” Mulder shrugged. “Turned them in by this morning. Kersh will barely pass me and tell me I’m off my rocker. The usual.”

 “I feel like you and Kersh would get along much better if you stopped trying to antagonize him,” Scully observed as she lead the way down rows of tables filled with studying students.

“I have a reputation to keep,” Mulder sniffed, stuffing his hands into his pockets and assuming a slouch. “Besides, who would Kersh harass if I wasn’t around to talk about UFOs and Bigfoot? I’m giving the guy some purpose.”

“Sure.” Scully had to squash the small smile threatening to rise to her lips. She suspected that Mulder saw it anyway, because he bumped her with his elbow.

They walked across half of campus in relative silence. Then they passed a group of students trying to gather signatures for some organization, and they spent the rest of the walk arguing about how useful petitions actually were in a democracy.

“Sure we don’t have an ideal system, but to say they completely worthless is—gah.” Scully shot a glare up at Mulder. “I’m supposed to be thinking about circuits right now, not poly sci.”

“Damn,” Mulder said, sucking his teeth. “Guess you won’t be the curve-wrecker after all. This looks like the end, Scully.”

“I’m laughing.” Scully yanked open the physics building’s front door and didn’t bother holding it open for Mulder. She could feel him laughing at her. Easy for _him_ to do; he wasn’t the one with medical school looming at the end of his undergraduate career.

“Hey, Scully,” Mulder said as they strode toward the lecture hall. Scully scraped up enough patience to turn toward him. She caught sight of his mussed hair and the glint of fluorescent light against thick glasses before she felt a warm, dry pair of lips on her hairline.

“You’ll do fine,” Mulder said. Scully blinked up at him and his soft smile.

“Thanks,” she said.

It took her several minutes — after she’d slid into her usual seat and shoved her satchel under her chair—to realize that Mulder had never done that to her before. Kiss her.

It took her another twenty minutes—in the middle of problem 3, part b—to recognize that it left her nervous.

***

Scully emerged from the lecture hall an hour later feeling pale and drawn out. She automatically scanned the hallway and spotted Mulder sitting on the bench hidden among the plastic trees. Scully trudged over to him and took time to marvel at how _Mulder_ he looked. Slumped in the bench like he’d never heard of back support, legs sprawled halfway across the hall, sweater obviously a few days worn, glasses about to fall off, book a few inches from his face.

And he’d kissed her. On the brow, yes. By most standards that meant nothing, but Scully found that it chafed like a pebble stuck in her shoe.

Mulder lifted his head. “Hey,” he greeted. “How was it?”

“Fine,” Scully said honestly. She made it the last few steps to the bench and sank to a sit beside him. She leaned her head back and felt the bench’s edge bite into the base of her skull. “The derivatives weren’t as complicated as I thought they’d be.”

“Small blessings.” The bench rattled as Mulder shifted. “So. About earlier. Want to go somewhere?” Scully rolled her head slightly and found Mulder grinning at her. She tried to imagine what could make him this giddy. Maybe rumors of a crashed UFO. She could just imagine that one: driving six hours to wander around an empty field with little metal detectors.

Still, Scully suspected that she’d agree to the latest escapade. Because nine times out of ten they never saw anything worth writing to the papers about, but they did end up sharing a few cans of cheap beer, swapping backstories, and getting into the kinds of arguments that Scully only ever had with her father or professors. Even when they ended up discussing aliens or psychokinesis, Mulder always treated the idea with such utter seriousness that Scully had no choice but to give it some modicum of seriousness as well. And those discussions, she found, were often the best ones.

“Yay? Nay?” Mulder asked. He was leaning forward, invading her personal bubble of space.

The pebble bit at Scully’s heel again, just enough to make her think about this seriously. Six hours in a small space. And Mulder had acted like this might extend into the weekend, which would involve crappy motel rooms at best and sleeping in the car at probable.

Scully opened her mouth and heard herself say, “I’m really wiped from this week.”

Something sank from Mulder’s expression. Scully got a sense that she’d just done something vaguely awful, and nearly opened her mouth to say, _But I’m still game; when do we leave?_

She didn’t, and her brain was still too fuzzy with derivatives out to figure out why.

“Yeah,” Mulder said. The edge of his mouth twitched up. “No, I get it.”

Scully slumped deeper into the bench.

“Maybe next weekend,” she tried. She nearly winced; she sounded like she was letting someone down gently, like Mulder had just asked her on a date. Almost convulsively, Scully pushed herself to a stand and snaked up her hand to get a grip on the strap of her satchel.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it completely. “I’m really sorry, Mulder.”

He blinked up at her. “It’s fine,” he said.

“I need to go,” Scully continued.

“Okay.” Mulder leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Give me a call later.”

“Yeah,” Scully said. She slapped on a smile, turned, and speed-walked to the front door.

***

Scully felt a weight rise from her shoulders when she entered her apartment and found that none of her roommates were home. She collected a box of crackers from the kitchen then went into her bedroom and tapped the door shut with a foot. She tossed the crackers and satchel on one half of her bed and fell across the other half. She spent several minutes there, with her face buried into the quilted bedspread her mother had made for Scully’s sixteenth birthday.

Scully had spent hours tracing the tight, neat stitches and varied patterns in the quilt. Her mother had used scraps of fabric from boxes of Scully’s old clothes, and sometimes Scully found patches of flowered fabric that pulled her back to the dress she wore for picture day in second grade, the overalls she’d worn to shreds in middle school.

Out in the living room, Scully could hear the front door unlocking followed by a pair of voices. She recognized Kelly’s bright laugh as the voices passed Scully’s room and become muffled a second later. Probably Kelly had invited one of her friends over to study. Scully shifted herself a little and imagined getting up from the bed and wandering into the hallway. Kelly’s door would be open and she would greet Scully, maybe invite her to come in and join them in studying. Scully could accept, and she could spend a perfectly nice evening being productive. Rather than, say, sitting in a car lousy with sunflower seed shells and listening to Mulder’s music.

The phone on her bedside table rang, and Scully lifted her head, hair askew in her eyes. She almost didn’t answer in case it was Mulder, then thrust out a hand to snatch the phone up.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hey, it’s Missy.” Scully let her eyes sink shut with relief.

“Hi,” she said, rolling onto her back. “Is everything okay?”

“Dandy. I quit my job,” Melissa said cheerfully. “I caught the manager taking angled pictures when I was wearing my short skirt.”

“Oh,” Scully said. She knew by now that commenting on the places Missy chose to work would just lead to sharp words from her sister. So instead she said, “You looking for a new job then?”

“Trying,” Melissa said. “I’ve got a friend who thinks he can get me in the café where he works. That’d be a nice change of pace, serving cute old ladies their coffees.”

“Sure,” Scully said. From the next room, Kelly and her friend broke into fresh laughter.

“Anything new with you?” Missy asked. Somewhere in the background, Scully heard TV-esque explosions.

“Um.” Scully picked at the frayed edge of a patch of blue paisley fabric that had a past life as a blouse.

“How’s alien boy?”

“Fine.”

A long pause.

“What happened?” Melissa asked, her voice sharp. The TV sound decreased. Damn. Sometimes, Scully could almost believe that Missy had that sixth sense she liked to talk about.

“Nothing happened.”

“Dana.”

“Nothing. He kissed me. It’s nothing.”

“Seriously? When?”

Scully puttered her lips and glared at the ceiling in lieu of her sister. “It was nothing,” she repeated. “Not even…it was a forehead kiss in the physics building.” Now that she voiced it, her reaction seemed even more overblown.

“Oh, damn, I thought you were talking about a drunken make out session,” Melissa said.

“No, I know, but…” Scully glared harder at the ceiling and tried to catch the words to explain the pebble pinching and biting at the sole of her foot. “Don’t you think that a guy only does something like that when…when he’s interested in getting something else?”

“You claimed you and Mulder weren’t like that.”

“We _aren’t_ but…” Scully made a low frustrated sound. “He wants to go on some road trip that’ll probably last a few days and I don’t know what to make of it, Missy.”

Scully listened to Melissa’s long silence and the muffled voices from Kelly’s room.

“Maybe you’re right, then. Maybe he’s looking for more. Honestly, this sounds like Ethan all over again.”

Scully squinched her eyes shut and rolled over on her side, tangling the phone cord up in her elbow and hair. Just like Missy to drag that one into the open.

“This is nothing like Ethan,” Scully tried.

“Not yet, but it’s heading there.” Melissa had found her thread, Scully could tell, and was grabbing hold of it. “You’re just going to have to make it clear to Mulder that you’re not interested, and maybe then you guys can still be friends.”

“Maybe,” Scully echoed bleakly. She imagined her and Mulder going through the ugliness that she and Ethan had undergone a year and a half ago and felt a sick, low swoop in the pit of her stomach.

“Make it to the point,” Melissa continued. “And probably don’t go on this trip; keep things even-keeled.”

Scully didn’t reply, eyes trained on the scatter of papers and books of her desk. Mulder had sat at that desk two days ago, socked feet perched on top of Scully’s English literature textbook. He’d been reading the Gunmen’s most recent publication. Every so often he’d interrupted Scully’s studying to read her paragraphs he thought she should hear. Eventually Scully had abandoned her work entirely to sit on the edge of her bed and argue about the technology of mind control.

“Dana?”

“Yeah,” Scully said sluggishly. She tangled her fingers in with the phone cord and kept her eyes on the desk. “Yeah, I hear you.”

***

Scully spent the next few hours feeling out of limbo. She ventured out of her room once to warm up leftovers in the microwave before disappearing behind her door again. Kelly’s friend eventually left; Scully’s two other roommates came home and at some point Scully heard someone’s boyfriend in the living room.

At 6 in the evening, Scully was curled up with a pile of academic papers for her independent research project when someone rapped lightly on her door.

“Hey,” Kelly said when Scully opened her door several seconds later. “So we got invited to a party on west campus. Interested?”

Scully blinked at Kelly and tried to imagine making small talk for several hours. It drained her just thinking about it.

“I think I’ll pass,” she said, smiling apologetically. “Midterms have been a beast.” She wondered how many excuses she could foist on schoolwork, and moreover, how long she could keep it up before people started seeing past it.

“I hear you,” Kelly grinned back. Music suddenly blared, and someone asked about borrowing someone else’s skirt. Scully sank into herself when she told Kelly to have a good time and gently closed her door on her roommate. She knew how she looked right now: fusty, grade-obsessed Dana who didn’t know how to loosen up and go to a party. (Which was unfair; she went to her share of outings. Just not this week.) Some part of Scully felt awkward and ashamed about this, but it wasn’t enough to outweigh the part of her that wanted, with every part of its being, to stay in her room and not worry about anything except deciphering medical research jargon.

By 7:30, roommates and accompanying boyfriends had clattered out the door, leaving the apartment still as a church. Scully tried to take advantage of the silence by blasting some of her own cassettes, but the music missed her by a mile. In the end she clicked off the cassette player, lay on her bed, and listened to her own breathing. The only light came from the pale orange glow of the streetlights outside her window. Scully considered that here—bathed in unnaturally colored light, the apartment silent around her—she could almost imagine things like alien abductions and ghosts were plausible. Almost. Maybe.

She wished she was in Mulder’s car driving to god-knows-where.

The notion hit Scully like a punch in the gut. It made her sit up and glare at the thick slices of light smeared across her floor. She wanted to be with the person who pulled parts of Scully she’d never noticed before into the open. The friend who was exasperating and believed in anything at all and yanked her on stupid UFO chases and who belonged to _her_.

It was enough to make Scully pull the phone from its cradle in a fumble of frustration and jab in Mulder’s number. She only had to wait two rings for the line to clatter and for Mulder’s voice to answer with a muffled, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Scully said. “You still want to go somewhere?”

***

Mulder’s horn honked for a third time.

“Yeah, hang on!” Scully shouted even though she knew Mulder couldn’t hear her. She scrawled the final few words of a note explaining to her roommates that she’d be gone the next few days. She stuck the note on the refrigerator, grabbed the duffel waiting on the couch, and slammed the apartment door behind her.

Mulder’s car idled in the parking lot, rattling and coughing exhaust. Scully tossed her duffel into the backseat and swung into the passenger seat. She had to extract a pile of papers and an empty sunflower seed bag from under her butt and toss them back to join her duffel.

“Thanks for cleaning up for me,” she said, and was half serious. The front passenger seat was often so deeply buried that Scully gave up and sat in the back.

“Only for you,” Mulder said. He sent his car lurching out of the parking lot. The sky was still a pale twilight gray as they snaked through the maze of tiny streets that made up north campus.

“So how about this,” Scully said. “I’ll guess what we’re going to see and you tell me whether I’m right or wrong.”

“Fair enough.”

“UFO crash site.”

“God, I wish.”

“Crop circle.”

“Nope.”

“Mysterious lights in the sky. Could be attributed to UFOs or secret military experiments using UFO technology.”

“Nice.” Scully turned her head just enough to catch sight of Mulder beaming at the road. “You’re good, Sculls.”

“So which is it?” Scully asked. “Aliens or the military?”

“That’s what we’re going to investigate,” Mulder confided, adjusting his glasses. He slid in and out of sight with each street lamp. “I’m acting as a field investigator for the Gunmen. If I find anything worthwhile, they’ll publish it in their next issue.”

“Wonderful.” Scully glanced compulsively at the back seat, as if she’d find the Three Stooges themselves hiding back there. “And why were you sent on this case? Could they not spare the cut into their gaming time?”

“I volunteered, actually,” Mulder said. “It’s good to get some work in the field, get away from the armchair research.”

“Right.”

“I’m hearing a lot of confidence there.”

“And what were you expecting?”

“One day, Scully,” Mulder said, shifting gears as they entered the highway entrance ramp. “One day, you will say ‘You were right, Fox Mulder, and I was wrong and I will never make doubt you again.’”

“Get me the hard evidence, and I’ll say the first part, at least,” Scully said, propping her feet on the dashboard and leaning back in the seat.

***

They drove into the Midwest. Scully thought that appropriate; she’d always spent her life shuttling along the coast. The central, landlocked portion of the country was still a relative mystery to her. It was the right place to be chasing mysterious lights in the sky.

“You’re making them sound like random lights,” Mulder argued three hours into the trip. “According to the reports, these have a clear pattern.”

“Sure,” Scully said muzzily. The initial adrenaline rush had faded, leaving the two of them to wander through conversations half distracted like they did during late night study sessions. Scully shifted lower on the seat and tightened her jacket around herself. Her head rested against the window and rolled with the car’s movements. They drove through indistinct farmland with its swells of crops and occasional blinding light of billboards. A band that Scully didn’t recognize burbled softly from the radio.

“What reports, though?” Scully asked.

“Um. People the Gunmen have communications with. Apparently this stuff has been circulating their circles for a while.”

“Hm,” Scully hummed. The car hit a rough patch, and she winced when her head banged against the window.

“Sorry,” Mulder said.

“’s fine.” Scully shifted her head looked up at the sky scattered with stars. She’d never voiced it to Mulder, but part of the reason she tolerated his UFO talk was because she thought she recognized some of the sentiments behind it. The feeling of staring into a universe and trying to decide what it held. Giving it a face and a name to make it a little bit fathomable. She could sympathize with that notion.

The song on the radio switched to something acoustic and soft. Scully stared at the stars that remained seemingly fixed while corn and soybean blurred beneath. The car rumbled around her. The air was warm, and Mulder sat within reaching distance.

***

Scully opened her eyes to stabbing light. To her left, the car door clicked shut, and Scully watched fuzzily while Mulder passed in front of the car and rounded to the gas tank. Scully lifted her head, winced at the knot in her neck, and popped open her own door. She let her feet land on the cracked, stained concrete, propped her elbows on her thighs and buried her face in her hands.

“Good sleep?” Mulder’s voice asked. A click of the gas tank being unscrewed.

“Where we?” Scully mumbled through her fingers.

“Almost there,” Mulder promised. “Just another half hour.”

Scully made a low sound that didn’t quite count as affirmation or complaint. She lifted her face from her hands and could feel the travel grime on her skin and hair. She tasted the diesel-laden air in the back of her throat.

“I said I would help drive,” she realized out loud, and squinted at Mulder through artificial light, yellow as butter. “You should have woken me up.”

“I like driving and I’m crap at sleeping, so honestly it was better this way,” Mulder said. He hooked the nozzle to the car, and Scully heard the low chug of gasoline. “Besides, you looked too cute to wake up.”

Scully felt her brow lower as Mulder checked that he had his wallet and turned to make his way for the little convenience store sitting at the edge of the gas station. She watched his sweater—the same one he’d been wearing earlier—wrinkle and crease with his movements.

Scully huffed suddenly and drew herself to a stand. She ruffled her hands through her hair to give it some body and set off to follow Mulder into the store. She wasn’t in the mood to have anxieties hanging over her; she’d figure it out as she went along.

***

They spent the next hour and a half easing their way along dark country roads. Mulder kept trying to read directions scribbled on the back of an envelope until Scully produced a flashlight from beneath her seat and took over as navigator.

“I haven’t seen any silos or antique malls,” Scully said, holding the envelope up to her face. “Who gave you these directions?”

“Frohike,” Mulder said. He rolled the car up to a T-shaped intersection. The headlights made the reflective highway sign float, unreal, in front of them.

“Ok, so intersection of Highway Z and—what are we on?—Highway H,” Scully read the sign, then glanced back to the directions. “No mention of either.”

“Who the hell names highways after letters?” Mulder asked, fingers rattling against the steering wheel.

“Do you have a road atlas anywhere around here?” Scully asked, bending over and peering hopefully in the cluttered foot well.

“I did at one point,” Mulder said. “For situations exactly like this one, and once we find it I can feel appropriately smug about being so prepared.”

“Give me a minute, then,” Scully said, unbuckling her seatbelt so she could tackle the foot well. “Keep driving, I guess. Maybe we’ll stumble across the silo.”

“Right or left, though?” Mulder asked, as if Scully would have any more an idea than him.

“I dunno,” Scully called out. “Left.”

“Right looks more friendly, though.”

Scully peered up at him and saw the edge of his mouth quirking.

“Go straight,” she deadpanned, and refocused on rifling through a pile of what looked like Mulder’s philosophy homework.

It took Scully five minutes to search the foot well and another ten to crawl into the backseat and do the same. She was about to announce that they’d need to pull over and hope the road atlas was hiding in the trunk when she stuck her hand beneath the driver’s seat and found something sticky and plastic.

“Hah!” she shouted, tugging the battered atlas free. She clambered back into the front seat and peeled apart pages wrinkled with a long-ago damp until she found a spread of the major roads of central Ohio.

“Okay,” Scully said. “So you went right on Highway Z and we’re looking for…”

“Highway LMNOP,” Mulder grunted.

“Don’t act so bitter; this is your goose chase, not mine.”

“We’re going to miss them at this rate,” Mulder said, leaning forward to peer into the sky. “The reports all say that they’re most active in the hours around midnight.” He sounded genuinely distressed, and it made Scully bite her bottom lip.

“Keep going on this road,” she said. “We’ll find it. I promise.”

***

They found the hill at four in the morning, with the promised silo standing guard on the pale horizon. Mulder exhaled hard at the sight of a bent, gnarled old oak atop the shallow hill.

“Yeah, this is it,” he said. Scully let the atlas slump in her lap.

Slowly, they opened their car doors and stepped into thick, dewy grass. They walked up the short hill and paused beneath the oak’s spreading leaves. The land around them was still shadowy and indistinct, though Scully could make out the lumps of houses and barns.

“Too light for them to be out,” Mulder said after a moment. Scully shot a glance at him.

“Sorry,” she said. “I should have said yes in the first place. We’d have gotten here earlier.”

Mulder shrugged, eyes still on the sky. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. His voice sounded slow and rasping. “I got us crap directions. We’ll be here tomorrow night.” He dropped his eyes suddenly to look at her. “If you’re still up for that.”

“I just spent seven hours crammed in a car,” Scully told him, wrinkling her nose. “I’m seeing those lights, alien or no.”

Mulder’s eyes lifted at their edges. Scully nearly jerked when something warm and rough bumped into her palm. A second later she discovered them to be fingers, and she was too tired to think hard about wrapping them up in her hand.

“Thanks for coming,” Mulder said around a short sigh. His grip on her hand was light yet firm, and Scully decided that she liked this: them standing shoulder to shoulder, hands intertwined, staring blearily into a dusting of stars.

“Yeah,” she told him. “Wouldn’t have missed it.”

***

They slept in the car because the notion of leaving the hill as soon as they had found it didn’t dare cross either of their minds. Mulder slept in the front seat and Scully buried herself underneath junk for warmth in the back. Once she removed the video cassette digging into her ribs, she dropped off like a rock.

Scully woke before Mulder, with the sun angling into the car and bathing her face in light. Scully sat up slowly and sent papers slithering to the floor. After digging through a side pocket of her duffel, Scully climbed out of the car with a bottle of water and a pack of beef jerky in hand. She made sure to click the car door shut behind her as gently as possible, then strode up the shallow hill to eat her breakfast beneath the oak.

The landscape around her was gentle hills of cropland and scattered forest. Scully curled up at the oak’s base and chewed through strips of jerky as she considered that this landscape belonged in the backdrop of a charming family film about country boys falling in love with country girls, with people who had never so much as heard of UFOs. Scully needed to ask Mulder about who, exactly, had reported mysterious lights.

Mulder appeared a half hour later, trudging up the hill with his hair sticking up on one side and his sweater now in desperate need of a laundry hamper. He accepted the jerky Scully offered to him with a mumble that she decided to translate into, “thank you.”

“So what were our plans for the day?” Scully asked when Mulder had slumped beside her. “Harass the locals about whether they’ve seen lights in the sky?”

Mulder squinted at her, still chewing. “ _Interview_ the locals,” he said in a prim, deliberate voice.

Scully had to look at the sky and bunch up her lips to keep from laughing.

***

Scully chose to take that Friday spent driving around Ohio countryside as a hands-on social experiment. She and Mulder received all sorts of reactions when they mentioned lights in the sky and the possibility of local UFO sightings or alien abductions. They found women who indulged their questions with small smiles on their faces, men who told them point blank that they were insane, senior citizens who looked mostly confused, and one woman who mistook them for members of a fringe cult.

“I wouldn’t blame her,” Scully said as they walked back to the car from that last one, the woman still watching them suspiciously from her living room window. “You were getting very impassioned by the end.”

“These people know exactly what I’m talking about, Scully,” Mulder said, his expression hard. “No one wants to be the one to say it, that’s all.”

“I think if you left out the U-word and the A-word, you’d get a more receptive audience,” Scully said. She opened her door and peered at Mulder over the car. “Just as a suggestion.”

“But it’s the _truth_ ,” Mulder argued. “In some capacity, something extraterrestrial is involved in this. People need to recognize that.”

Scully tilted her head, brows drawn. “Mulder, you literally have zero proof supporting that idea,” she said.

“But I can tell.”

Mulder opened his own door and slid behind the wheel. Scully remained where she was for another several seconds and wondered whether Mulder thought he’d just thrown down some inarguable fact.

“It’s getting late,” Mulder said when Scully followed him into the car. “Want to head into town and find dinner?” He sounded relaxed again, like he hadn’t just been assumed a cultist by a stranger. Figured, though. This was his life, wasn’t it? Being shouted down every time he opened his mouth. Scully would have felt bad about being among those doing the shouting, but Mulder couldn’t say, ‘I can tell’ and expect that to prove his point. Things didn’t work because anyone could ‘just tell.’ It smacked of delusion.

Scully propped her elbow against the window, leaned her head against one hand, and looked wearily over at Mulder. And yet, she considered, here she was driving with him to every one of these houses, standing beside him and smiling politely while he asked strangers whether they’d ever experienced an abduction. She only poked holes in his arguments when it was just the two of them; she could say that much.

“Sure,” she finally said. “My body’s going to reject any more beef jerky, I think.”

“Yeah speaking of your body rejecting and beef jerky. Wasn’t going to mention it, Scully, but…”

“Thanks.” Scully poked his arm. “I think you’ll survive.”

“Debatable,” Mulder replied. Scully had to poke his arm a second time, much harder.

***

Navigating the area was much easier in the daylight, and they found the town where they had gassed up the night before without much trouble. Scully pointed out a small diner with flowers in the window boxes, and Mulder pulled into its gravel parking lot.

The diner had filmy linoleum flooring and worn wooden walls covered in framed amateur paintings and newspaper clippings. The waitress who greeted them had a side ponytail, a flower tucked in her hair, and a cute smile. She practically chirped when she asked them whether they preferred a table or a booth.

“Booth,” Mulder said before Scully could open her mouth. The waitress led them past families and elderly couples, to a booth in the corner with well-worn red vinyl cushioning. She handed them two plastic menus, took their drink orders, and left in a flurry of hair and flower.

“You think she paints that smile on?” Mulder asked, voice conspiratorial.

“Oh, leave her alone,” Scully said, picking up the laminated menu. It felt slightly oily. “You have to be overly friendly as a waitress otherwise people start forgetting tips.” A pause. “And she’s got a very nice smile.”

“You ever waitressed?” Mulder asked, his voice suddenly bright with interest. Scully pursed her lips and studied the soup options.

“A little, in high school,” she said. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a career. People are jerks, it turns out.”

“Oh yeah?” Mulder still hadn’t picked up his menu. “Any good stories?”

“Nothing I want to relive right now.” Scully inspected Mulder over the top of her menu. “Get some wine in me and ask that again.”

“Ask drunk Scully about waitressing. It’s on the bucket list,” Mulder said. He finally clattered open his menu. “So want to share a milkshake with two straws and play footsie?” he asked.

This wasn’t an unusual thing for Mulder to say, really. He liked to keep up a steady stream of ridiculous, suggestive comments like he had a quota to fill. But in light of the last day, it made Scully’s heart skip a beat. She clenched her teeth at her own reaction. It put her too much in mind of how she’d been around Ethan at the tail end of their relationship, and maybe Missy had been right, maybe Mulder was just the new Ethan, and if that was the case then Scully didn’t think she could—

A sweating glass of ice water landed in front of Scully. A similar glass of coke appeared before Mulder a second later, followed by two paper-covered straws tossed into the middle of the table.

“Ready to order?” asked the waitress—her plastic name tag said she was named Amelia. Scully looked up at her and was struck yet again at how well Amelia’s dark hair and the bright yellow flower set off gray eyes and a round, sun-touched face.

“I am,” Mulder said. “Scully?”

“What?” Scully blinked, then glanced at the menu again. “Yeah, sure.”

After putting in their orders, Amelia whisked away their menus as efficiently as she’d brought the drinks. Scully took a sip from her water and watched Amelia navigate the tables with casual efficiency. After she disappeared into the kitchen, Scully looked across the table and found Mulder scanning the diner.

“I bet this whole place is a rumor mill, Scully,” Mulder said. “Small town like this, people need to chat somewhere. Think if we talked to people—“

“Mulder, you’re not going to bother people’s dinner. You can take a break for an hour.” Mulder slid his eyes over to her, then he pressed his lips together. “Maybe ask the wait staff on our way out,” Scully added as a compromise.

“Yeah,” Mulder said. He crumpled up the paper from his straw. “Good idea.”

Scully might have felt a twinge of guilt, except then the wadded up straw wrapper flew across the table and bounced off her left cheek.

***

Once they had finished their meal and paid at the front register, Mulder searched for the bathroom while Scully went outside to wait by the car. The sky had dimmed into twilight, and the breeze had picked up, enough for Scully to wish she had the car keys so she could get her sweater. Instead she had to lean against the car’s nose, cross her arms and hunch her shoulders.

In front of her, the diner’s side door opened and a figure stepped out. A second later, a lighter flared enough to illuminate dark hair, a yellow flower, and gray eyes. Scully was still watching when the lighter clacked off, replaced by the orange glow of a cigarette.

“Want one?” a voice asked.

Scully jerked. “Sorry,” she blurted. Amelia laughed; it was bright and warm, and reminded Scully of Kelly’s laugh.

“Here.” Amelia proffered a pack. “You look a little desperate.”

“I’m trying to quit,” Scully admitted, and walked the five steps to where Amelia leaned against the wall. Scully took a cigarette and placed it in her mouth. She leaned over to let Amelia light it up. Amelia smelled of perfume overlain with cooking grease.

“Today’s your cheat day, then,” Amelia told her. Her voice was lower and raspier when off duty; Scully decided she liked it. She smiled wide at Amelia around a deep draw and an exhale of meandering blue smoke.

“You’re not local,” Amelia said when Scully leaned against the wall as well.

“No,” Scully conceded. “We’re from Maryland.”

Amelia whistled. “And what, you’re road tripping?” she asked.

“Something like that.” Scully inhaled on the cigarette again and tried to line up her thoughts. “Mulder wanted to check some things out here.”

“That’s your boyfriend?”

Scully coughed.

“No, no he’s not my…we’re friends.” Scully looked at Amelia, and saw how the light from the diner’s front fell over her cheekbones and eyelashes. “We’re friends,” she repeated.

“Okay.” Amelia had a certain twist in the corner of her mouth that made Scully try to analyze her and Mulder’s behavior over the last hour, to see whether they’d done anything overt. But she couldn’t think of anything; they’d been their usual selves, airborne straw wrapper and all.

And maybe that was just the problem. The two of them, being themselves, strayed too close to other territories. It made Scully’s stomach sour.

“What sorts of things does he want to check out?” Amelia was asking. Scully let out a vague laugh and clamped the cigarette between her lips again.

“Lights in the sky,” she said, flagrant. “He’s been hearing stories and wanted to see them.”

“Oh,” Amelia said. Then, “Yeah, I’ve seen those. Out on the edge of the county.” Scully’s hair swung into her eyes when she turned her head to see Amelia properly. Amelia smiled halfway, almost apologetically, and exhaled a mist of smoke. “You have to go to the right places,” she added. “And then you have to pick the right night. But they’re out there.”

“What are they?” Scully asked.

“I mean, I guess we say they’re airplanes. But honestly?” Amelia shrugged. “Those are no airplanes I’ve seen. Too big and bright and low, y’know?”

Scully licked her lips. “And how many times have you seen them? What do they look like?”

“I’ve seen ‘em twice, though I’ve got friends who’ve seen them loads. They’re these big, glowing yellow lights that’re all clumped together and do this slow, uh, sweep across the sky. Effing creepy.”

“Are you scared of them?”

“I mean, they never do anything,” Amelia said, rubbing at one eye with a hand ending in white, manicured tips. “Just do their thing and then disappear up north.” She waved her cigarette in that direction.

“Scully?”

Scully looked up at the sound of Mulder’s voice. At the same time, Amelia tossed her cigarette butt into the dirt.

“I’d better head back in,” Amelia said. “Dinner rush is still going.”

“Yeah,” Scully said, feeling oddly stretched between Amelia and the sound of Mulder approaching. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“Sure. Good luck with the lights.” Amelia smiled wide as the moon and winked at her, then opened the door and disappeared in a swing of dark hair and a clatter of kitchen sounds. Scully stood rooted in the spot, cigarette still dangling from her fingers.

“Scully?” Scully turned to Mulder and realized far too late that she was blushing. With her pale, Irish skin, she must have looked like a strawberry.

“I thought you were quitting,” Mulder said, frowning at the cigarette.

“I am.” Scully flicked the remains of the cigarette into the dirt. It bounced and landed beside Amelia’s. “I was indulging.”

“Hey, me too,” Mulder said, and placed a hand on the small of her back to lead her back to the car. “Indulging my vice of bothering nice peoples’ dinner.”

“Mulder, I didn’t mean—“

“Nah, you were right, it was better to wait and then ask some of the staff. Guess what I found out?” Mulder’s hand pressed into her back with his excitement, and that somehow made Scully smile, though search her if she knew why. The evening had taken on a strange edge.

“They’ve got the aliens disguised as short order cooks back there,” Scully suggested.

“Close,” Mulder said. He let his hand drop to pull a folded photo from his pocket. “I found a bus boy who’s seen these lights tons of times, and he’s managed to get photos.” He flourished the wrinkled photo in front of Scully, and she had to grab it to properly examine it. She saw a rough shape of power lines and trees at the bottom of the photo, and above them, six round yellow lights. They didn’t seem to be connected to a larger craft, but with the photo’s quality, Scully wouldn’t have been able to tell anyway.

“So they’re real,” Mulder said. “This is real.”

“Yeah,” Scully sighed, letting the photo go. “I just talked to our waitress. She’s seen them too.”

“Really?” Mulder sounded torn between intrigued and confused. “You interviewed her?”

“I chatted with her, and it happened to come up,” Scully said defensively. “And no one said a thing about aliens or UFOs, Mulder. She said she’d seen lights; that’s it.”

“But that’s two confirmed witnesses,” Mulder said, waving the photograph again. “Scully, we might have hit pay dirt with this one.”

“All we can say is that there are lights flying over this area,” Scully said, straightening her back. “Mulder, you can’t extrapolate that to aliens.”

“So what is it then?” Mulder demanded. “From what I’ve been hearing, these lights don’t look a thing like the usual airplanes or satellites.”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Scully admitted. “My best guess right now is experimental aircraft. Maybe there’s some…some genius engineer living around here who likes to tinker—Mulder, stop giving me that look.”

“What look?”

“That ‘Scully-you’re-being-too-practical-for-me’ look. Listen, don’t just turn your brain off as soon as I suggest an explanation that doesn’t involve extraterrestrials. That’s not how you prove anything.”

Mulder rocked back on his heels briefly. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Okay, we’ll add eccentric inventors to the list of possibilities.”

“Thank you,” Scully said. She turned and crunched through the gravel to the car. Mulder followed more slowly, thumbing at the edges of the blurry photograph.

***

They drove back to the small hill with its gnarled oak and silo in the distance. They arrived just as the sun properly set, streaks of red and pink bleeding at edge of the sky. Scully piled on two sweaters before she joined Mulder on the ratty blanket he’d spread beneath the oak.

They spent the first two hours talking without any aim. Mulder vented about his psych classes and his professors’ purported close mindedness. Scully listed out all the pros and cons of going into medical school, what classes she still needed to take to be ready for the MCAT, whether this was really the right decision for her. Mulder had already heard this ten times over, but he still hummed and nodded at all the right parts. Scully felt inordinately grateful to him for it.

“It’s just hard,” Scully said, frowning into the darkness. “Because I almost don’t know whether I want to be a doctor because of me or my parents.”

“Those things can line up,” Mulder said from somewhere to her left. She could make out his edges by the thin moonlight. “I think you’re just lucky enough to want to study something that also makes your parents happy.”

“I guess.” Scully drew in her shoulders at another sharp, cool breeze. “If I ever want to rebel, I guess I can always take up a promising career in alien hunting.”

“Absolutely,” Mulder said. “One hundred percent guaranteed to concern any parental figure and get you long talks over Christmas break about realistic career options.”

Scully turned toward Mulder’s voice, smiling slightly. “Mulder, you haven’t seriously told your parents you want to hunt aliens, have you?”

“There are people out there who do it.”

Some weight in Mulder’s voice killed the quip already forming in Scully’s mind. She let it scatter and rubbed her fingers thoughtlessly against the pilled fabric of the blanket, feeling the give of grass blades beneath it.

“Physics isn’t too hard,” she said. She tilted her chin to the heavens splayed over them. “Could get into astronomy and look for aliens on the sly during your telescope time.”

Mulder hummed. “Seems moot,” he said. “Since they’re already busy fingering our lives here on the ground.” Scully stilled and didn’t look over in case she saw something she shouldn’t, like whatever expression Mulder had on right now.

“Scully,” Mulder continued. “Can you seriously look at all that and tell me nothing like us lives out there?” His voice spurred Scully into flicking her eyes in his direction. Mulder had clasped his arms around his splayed knees and tilted his head toward the sky. Ambient light left a sheen on his glasses.

“Maybe,” Scully relented. She drew in her legs to sit cross-legged and pushed hair behind her ear. “But intelligent life, advanced enough for it to travel to Earth, and when it’s here it decides to mutilate cows and draw pictures in corn fields? That’s the part I have trouble with.”

“But if we’re being honest,” Mulder said. “If humans ever get to the point where we could visit other planets, don’t you think we’d do the same thing? Experiment and exploit on our own terms? Especially if we considered the living things on this other planet as primitive?”

“I like to think we’d have a little more diplomacy.”

“Several thousand Native Americans would disagree.”

Scully drew in her lips and, with a short exhale, tilted backward and stretched out on her back. Her shoulder bumped up against Mulder’s hip. Mulder dropped his head and scrutinized her in the window made by his arm, bent leg, and torso.

“So that’s you saying I’m right?” he asked.

“This is me saying that this whole argument is based on too many unknowns and extrapolations to go anywhere, and we’ve already had it so I know exactly where it’s going to go, and it’s cold, and I got scattered sleep last night.”

“If you want to sleep, I’ll wake you up if anything interesting happens,” Mulder told her, his voice lower.

“I won’t fall asleep,” Scully said, mulish.

“Sure.” Mulder leaned back on his hands. Scully readjusted with him, leaned her head into his hip, and stared at a sky framed by the oak and Mulder.

And she hadn’t been lying, really. Even an hour later when her lids had fluttered shut and her breathing had evened out, she was still awake enough to feel Mulder’s heat beside her, to hear him shifting and making the grass crackle. She was awake enough to feel his fingers ghosting over her hair to tuck away errant strands, and she was awake enough to know that it comforted and saddened her at the same time.

***

“Scully?”

“Yeah, m’wake.” Scully snapped her eyes open and blinked at Mulder’s face hovering over her. Bags under his eyes hung in deeper shadow than the rest of him. Behind him, the oak branches grasped across a pallet of stars.

“Hey, it’s three in the morning,” Mulder told her. “If you want to go down to the car.”

“Mm.” Scully brought up one hand to rub at her eyes. “No, I’m fine. Nothing yet?”

“No. The lights don’t appear every night.” Mulder half smiled apologetically. “We might end up seeing a whole lot of nothing.”

“All in the pursuit of knowledge, right?”

“Theoretically.”

“C’mon,” Scully patted the space beside her. “Close your eyes for a little. You look wrecked.”

“I’m not wrecked.”

“You got what, two hours of sleep last night?”

“Three.” Mulder stretched out beside her. They looked at one another across the blanket and the splay of Scully’s hair; Mulder’s eyes were bright even if his lids were drooping and his hair needed a brush. Scully nearly reached to comb it out with her fingers.

“Scully?”

Her arms jerked slightly with an action conceived and then aborted.

“Hm?”

“Why’re you here exactly?” Mulder frowned. “I mean, not to say I don’t…I’m _glad_ you came. But…” He closed his mouth abruptly, lips tight, and Scully was too groggy to fend off a wash of sympathy and fondness.

“Why do I go on alien hunts when I don’t believe in aliens?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

“Um.” Scully shrugged and tugged her sleeves over her hands. “It’s better than studying.”

“Right.”

“Because I like it.” Scully shifted her head back up to the sky. “I like the traveling and I like breaking into buildings sometimes and I like sitting around at night, talking. It’s our thing, and I like it.”

Mulder shifted to his side and propped his head up on one hand. He peered down at her, still looking rumpled, but now newly alert. He looked curious.

Scully saw it coming a second before Mulder leaned forward. She didn’t try to dissuade him. She remained where she was, spine straight, and let his dry, smooth lips graze over her own. She tasted traces of the mint Mulder had been sucking on after the restaurant and salt grains hidden beneath that.

Mulder pulled away after several seconds when he realized Scully wasn’t returning the kiss. He stared down at her, and Scully recognized in a distant way that the other shoe had just dropped. She wished it didn’t have to come so soon. She brought a hand up and rubbed it over her lips before she could think properly. Mulder sat up in a burst of movement.

“Oh,” he said, voice blank. “Shit, I’m sorry. I—“ He looked around. Searching for what, Scully had no idea. “I didn’t mean to—“

“Mulder.” Scully paused. She felt slow, like she was looking at this whole performance from a safe distance and was unwilling to step into the thick of it. She didn’t want to, was the thing. She wanted to float in the minutes and hours that had led here. The nights of studying and the car rides and sleeping over on Mulder’s couch and lying beside him on a hill in Ohio while he searched and hoped for signs of life beyond this planet. She wanted for that to have lasted forever.

Except there sat Mulder looking like he’d just slapped her, so Scully had to haul herself to a sit and grasp at his hand. She squeezed it hard enough to make her knuckles ache. “You’re fine,” she said.

“ _You_ don’t look fine.”

“Yeah. Well. That’s my problem.” Scully tried to smile, but it came out wrong.

“Scully—“

“I’m sorry. I’m flattered, but we should stay friends.”

The words sounded disgustingly overused as soon as they dropped from her mouth, especially when Mulder’s expression slipped from stricken into something more resigned, even embarrassed. That wasn’t what she’d meant.

“Right,” Mulder said. He tried to tug his hand from her grasp, and Scully held on, because somewhere inside her she’d convinced herself that if she let go now, Mulder would fly away and she’d never find him again.

“Ethan,” she blurted.

“What?”

“Ethan. You know him?”

Mulder frowned lightly, trying to decipher her meaning. “You’ve mentioned him.”

“He was my best friend in high school,” Scully said. She let her eyes drift until they settled on the space above Mulder’s head. “Then in senior year he said he’d always had a crush on me. So we started dating.” She stopped, her jaw working. “And then six months later we broke up in a huge fight and we haven’t talked since, and it was my fault.”

Mulder was still staring, uncomprehending.

“Ethan was the best thing in that school,” Scully said in a hard voice. “I cared about him. But I got so sick of the dates and the flowers and all the complications just because we started calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend. He told me I didn’t…didn’t _fight_ for him, like he wanted me to start acting catty to any girl who talked to him. I just didn’t _care_. So I told him I liked us better as plain friends, and Ethan took it as a huge insult.” Scully barked a laugh. “Really, the only reason we lasted so long was because we both liked the sex.”

A breeze knocked oak leaves against one another and made the branches groan above them. Mulder shifted to face her properly.

“So what you’re saying is—“

“I’ve never been good at…” Scully waved a hand. “That sort of thing. I’ve always gotten it wrong, and it’s always cost me friends, and I like you, Mulder, probably more than you’d guess, but I’m not interested in trying this one more time just to confirm that I’m screwed up.”

“You’re not screwed up,” Mulder said automatically.

“Right,” Scully said flatly. “So, I’m sorry, and I mean this in the best possible way, but we’ll be better off as friends.”

“You’re not screwed up,” Mulder repeated. His voice had grown firmer.

Scully glared at him. Like it was his job in life to contradict her wherever he could. “Listen. I have no idea what to do with dates,” she snapped. “I _hate_ them. I’ve gone out with the most decent guys you’ve met and I still couldn’t wait to get the hell away. I’m dreading the day that my parents realize that I won’t ever get married. That sounds perfectly normal, does it Mulder?”

“I’ve got a whole cabinet for porn, but I’ve had to pretend to get hard when a girl showed me her tits, then I booked it before she figured out the truth,” Mulder shot back. “‘Cause guess what I’ve found out, Scully? If you were to strip right now, my body wouldn’t know what to do with that either.”

Scully closed her mouth with a small _clack_. Mulder kept looking at her like he was daring her to say the first thing on her mind.

“Is it a medical—“

“I can get it up just fine,” Mulder cut in. “It just doesn’t tend to bother for people. Because I’m screwed up, I guess.”

“You’re not—oh christ.” Scully rubbed at her eyes briefly.

“I mean, no wonder we get along.” Mulder suddenly flopped onto his back again. Scully, still clutching his hand, twisted around to see what he was doing and found his chest bouncing with something like laughter, though it didn’t sound like it.

“What?” she demanded.

“Us,” Mulder shook his head. “This is…I don’t know. It’s something.”

Scully bit at her bottom lip, then let go of Mulder’s hand and sprawled out next to him. In a burst of some emotion—she couldn’t have even pinpointed it as positive or not—she tossed an arm across his shoulders and rested her chin on top of his head. Mulder was still shaking with his not-laughter when he turned his head and buried his face in her sweaters.

“What were we doing again?” Scully asked.

“Hell if I know,” Mulder said in a muffled voice. He released a final cough and edged closer, until he lined up with her along a tight seam. Scully could feel his warm pulse sifting through her body and tucked a kiss into his hair for it. He hummed back, and for a long while after that, they didn’t try to speak.

“I could never figure it out,” Mulder murmured suddenly. “But I’d still play the game, so that I’d have a good excuse to touch someone.”

“Oh.” Scully dipped her hand to the base of the back of Mulder’s neck and began to trace slow, deep circles, skirting the smooth hills of his vertebrae.

“I don’t need…” Mulder inhaled unevenly. “I wouldn’t ask for anything you don’t want. I know what it’s…I wouldn’t ask.”

“I want to not lose us,” Scully muttered.

Mulder heaved a long sigh and pressed into Scully even tighter. “Okay,” he said. “Then we’re on the same page.”

“Okay.” Scully squeezed her eyes shut and decided that she could afford to believe him.

***

**Epilogue**

Somewhere on the edge of dawn Scully had her eyes half lidded and her fingers now rubbing slow circles over Mulder’s shoulder blade. His breathing had long ago slowed and evened, he’d relaxed into her, and Scully felt oddly proud that she’d managed to bring him to sleep.

Then something pressed into Scully’s eardrum, and she snapped her head up instinctively.

Her mouth curved into a wide ‘O’.

“Mulder.”

Mulder mumbled something indistinguishable.

“Mulder.” Scully propped herself on one arm. “Mulder!”

“Mm?” Mulder lifted his head, peered up at her, then twisted around.

It resembled a monstrous candelabra hung from a celestial ceiling. Six perfectly globular yellow lights arranged in a circle, sliding northward along the sky in unison. They hung as low as a plane coming to land.

Mulder sagged back into Scully, and she had enough light to see the way his eyes widened and his lips parted. He looked transfixed, almost luminescent, and it took Scully too long to realize that she was watching him instead of the sky. Her hands still clutching Mulder’s shoulders, Scully craned her head and began to time the lights’ movements by heartbeats. After 249, she lost count.

The lights never wavered in their velocity or brightness. Scully vacillated three different times about whether she could see a solid craft connecting them all. And she thought that maybe, right at the edge of her hearing, more of a vibration in her bones and inner ear fluid, she heard a grinding hum.

The six lights scooted along and grew smaller. Eventually, the horizon ate them up in a final glimmer, and the world sighed back into reality. Scully exhaled sharply, then cut her gaze to the east. She could see a pink tinge.

“That was an aberration,” Mulder murmured. His voice rang high, almost shrill, after the hum. “They shouldn’t have come out this close to dawn.” He shifted forward, and Scully let go of him so he could scramble to a stand, his head still turned up to the sky. She stood as well and compulsively reached out to trap his sleeve between her thumb and pointer finger. Mulder turned to her suddenly. “We found them,” he said, his voice tilting on excitement. “Scully, we found them.”

“We found…something,” she agreed. Her heart was still ramming against her ribs.

Mulder blinked at her. “That’s your—god, that’s such a Scully reaction. _We found something_. Did you not see that? That’s not terrestrial.”

He was so familiar in that moment, so himself, that it let Scully shift her thoughts back into well-used patterns. She’d have to thank him for it later.

“How can you be so sure? You can just tell?” Scully lifted her chin and narrowed her mouth.

“I—” Mulder lifted his hand briefly before slapping it against his thighs. “It’s like trying to persuade a brick wall. You know that?”

“Okay, fine, how about this?” Scully took on a high-pitched voice. “Gee whiz, Mulder, looks like it was aliens all along. You were right, I was wrong, and I’ll never doubt you ever again.”

Mulder coughed abruptly. “Smartass,” he told her.

“Yeah, be careful what you wish for. I’m still gunning for military and-or eccentric.”

“’Course you are. How about this: loser has to do the other person’s laundry for a month.”

“Oh come on, Mulder. As if we’re going to figure out what that was by Monday.”

“Well.” Mulder shrugged. “We can try.”

Shaking her head, Scully glanced into the sky again. Whatever ill-advised venture Mulder was already planning, she knew that she’d be following him. She doubted she could take any other course of action without disappointing herself.

“What’s so funny?” Mulder asked.

Scully had to drop her grin to the ground as the sun started to break over the horizon.

“Nothing,” she said. “Us.”

 


End file.
